Book Reviews

A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. I picked this book up knowing some of it's history, and not ever wanting to read it. But I was curious. Why had it been considered so good?

In the first page he wakes (written in the first person) on a plane with the feeling of something warm dripping down his chin.

"My front four teeth are gone," he writes. "I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are nearly shut."

But he opens his eyes and looks around to see he's on a plane and alone. "... my clothes are covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood."

The rest of the first chapter goes on to tell how the attendant tells him that a doctor and two men brought him on the plane. And then how he struggles to walk to a wheelchair, how he can barely even stand, how she takes him to the exit bridge where she leaves him and he has to sit down. "She laughs," he says. He vomits, wiping his hands on the floor as he stands and gets into the wheelchair she brought.

His parents, meeting the plane, take him home where he cops a bottle of whiskey from the kitchen (leaving his parents in their "room"). He's in his "Parents" "House." [He likes to quote those kinds of words but he never uses quotes for what people say or adds "she said," or "I said," for the dialogs -- he's that good!]

And he proceeds to drink and smoke into "blackness" thinking about "her." [Unspecified.]

My Commentary

That's the end of chapter one. And it's total bullshit. Why? First, no doctor [and he did not specify who the other men were] would EVER have placed a man in his condition -- busted teeth, hole in cheek, vomit and urine soaked, most likely intoxicated -- on a plane. [A plane with no other people!] A doctor would have put him in a HOSPITAL!

And his apparent falling on the exit bridge and vomiting and the attendant laughing? Bullshit. A flight attendant's job is to take care of the passengers -- her employment depends on it.

All of what he described is pure bullshit -- I know, I have been in such a condition more than once, no busted teeth, but with many lacerations, once on my face. I was hospitalized each time with nothing I could have done to prevent it. It's like the law.

The publisher (his agent if he had one), the reviewers, and Oprah Winfrey were all negligent -- each and every one -- for not checking his story.